Aerojet volunteers package 11,880 meals for starving children in Haiti.

Photo courtesy of Aerojet

Hands On Sacramento is the local arm of Community Link, a national effort that director Deanna Berg says connects employee groups and individuals with “projects that just need doing but aren’t funded or staffed enough to do them.”

The volunteer projects have a wide range — everything from coordinating nearly 1,000 volunteers to manage Martin Luther King Day activities last January to helping serve and clean up at the Sacramento Food Bank.

Aerojet volunteers package 11,880 meals for starving children in Haiti.

Photo courtesy of Aerojet

“We’re sort of a matchmaker,” Berg said. Hands On Sacramento works with 300 nonprofit organizations and more than 16,000 registered volunteers, principally through its website (handsonsacto.org). Berg’s paid staff is small — about five people, depending on the time of year. Among their responsibilities: staffing the regional Emergency Volunteer Center in times of disasters, such as floods, fires and large-scale accidents.

Hands On Sacramento has been around for 14 years. It’s part of Community Link, the former Community Services Planning Council whose annual print directory of regional resources was a bible for nonprofit organizations and government agencies.

Hands On Sacramento is a key resource for companies that support their employees’ desire to provide community service. The company gives the nonprofit a donation — Berg said the average is $50 per employee — and it arranges “everything from site preparation to getting project leaders there and making sure lunch gets delivered” on the day of service. The fee varies depending on how much behind-the-scenes work the company is willing to take on.

Last year Hands On Sacramento worked with DeLoitte, the financial services firm, which wanted a project for 150 of its employees. “I suggested they help clean up a north-area park,” she said, “because one obvious result of local governments cutting their budgets is our parks are going to ruin.”

The group not only cleaned up the park “in only four hours, but also made it look better than it had in years.” Recently, DeLoitte came back to the nonprofit to tackle four projects in Oak Park, including cleanup of two schools and assisting at Sacramento Area Emergency Housing.

Berg said her group makes a conscious effort to match a company’s volunteer activity with its mission. For example, when Hands On Sacramento works with furniture giant IKEA, “We know that its mission is three-fold: to do good things for women, children and the environment. So we find a project, like working at a shelter, to coincide with its stated causes.”

Sara Minnehan, who heads up Aerojet Delivers, the company’s employee involvement program, pointed to another match-up facilitated by Hands On Sacramento.

This past March, a group of about 20 Aerojet employees joined workers from other companies to clean up the grounds, paint murals and build planter boxes at Harmon Johnson Elementary School in the Twin Rivers district.

“Even though all of us want to do good things,” Minnehan said, “we work at jobs all week. The only time for us to get involved is on the weekend, when we want to be with our families. Hands On Sacramento encouraged us to bring our families and friends to the school. It was the best of both worlds.”

Hands On Sacramento, Minnehan added, “is a great tool for corporate partners to use to link us with nonprofits in our region. And we love working with Deanna.”